title: Liaison acquisition, word segmentation and construction in French: a usage-based account.
abstract: In the linguistics field, liaison in French is interpreted as an indicator of interactions between the various levels of language organization. The current study examines the same issue while adopting a developmental perspective. Five experiments involving children aged two to six years provide evidence for a developmental scenario which interrelates a number of different issues: the acquisition of phonological alternations, the segmentation of new words, the long-term stabilization of the word form in the lexicon and the formation of item-based constructions. According to this scenario, children favour the presence of initial CV syllables when segmenting stored chunks of speech of the type word1-liaison-word2 (les arbres 'the trees' is segmented as /le/+/zarbr/). They cope with the variation of the liaison in the input by memorizing multiple exemplars of the same word2 (/zarbr/, /narbr/). They learn the correct relations between the word1s and the word2 exemplars through exposure to the well-formed sequence (un+/narbr/, deux+/zarbr/). They generalize the relation between a word1 and a class of word2 exemplars beginning with a specific liaison consonant by integrating this information into an item-based schema (e.g. un+/nX/, deux+/zX/). This model is based on the idea that the segmentation of new words and the development of syntactic schemas are two aspects of the same process.
authors.affiliation: LIDILEM, Université Stendhal, Grenoble, France. jpchevrot@wanadoo.fr
authors.forename: Jean-Pierre
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Chevrot
authors.forename: Celine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Dugua
authors.forename: Michel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fayol
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics; D013060:Speech; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014825:Vocabulary